Software Diagnostics Library

Yesterday was one of those days when I was in a good mood thinking about bugs. Suddenly a thought stroke me about the similar sounding words bacterium and bugterium (perhaps because I’m currently reading a theoretical biology book, Essays on Life Itself). I admit that it might be sounding the same only for a non-native English ear though. So the new definition was born:

Bugterium (pl. bugteria) - an instance of a memory dump analysis pattern found in a crash (memory, core) dump file.

Why a bugterium and not a cdarium? The motivation (with a hindsight) lies in the complexity of debugging (and life forms). While a bug is a complex thing (and a beast) and it takes sometimes days or weeks to chase and fix (kill) the one, a bugterium (bacterium) is of relatively smaller complexity and can be easily identified and dealt with by component removal or upgrade (massively killed). From software support perspective remember this bugtation No.14:

Crash dump analysis ”is anticipated with” joy, “performed with” eagerness, “and bragged about forever.”

Although the perceived simplicity of crash dump analysis is deceptive (bugtation No.2):

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious” crash.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under Announcements, Bugtations, Crash Dump Analysis, Crash Dump Patterns, Debugging, Fun with Crash Dumps, New Words, Software Technical Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.